Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: Title Commentary

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CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN: TITLE COMMENTARY

The Yellow Wallpaper

CATHERINE GOLDEN (ESSAY DATE 1992)

SOURCE: Golden, Catherine. "One Hundred Years of Reading 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" In The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on "The Yellow Wallpaper," edited by Catherine Golden, pp. 1-23. New York: The Feminist Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Golden offers a comprehensive overview of criticism on The Yellow Wallpaper.

The redefinition of the literary canon has directed attention to a number of overlooked works by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women writers. Prominent among this group is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." From its first publication in the January 1892 issue of New England Magazine¹ until the early 1970s, "The Yellow Wallpaper" was virtually unknown; it found its way into only a few collections of short fiction between 1892 and 1972.² A cursory glance at the chronologically arranged Table of Contents and Bibliography of this book reveals the critical attention this complex and controversial story has received since it was republished in 1973. Along with Herland, "The Yellow Wallpaper" has gained distinction among the fiction produced by Gilman, a leading turn-ofthe-century feminist lecturer and writer;³ her fictional account of a psychological breakdown offers a chilling Poe-esque plot, a well-crafted and powerful style, and a feminist perspective on the sociocultural situation confronting women in the late nineteenth century. It has now been incorporated into the contemporary canon of American literature and hailed in the feminist canon.

The selections included in the Backgrounds and Criticism sections demonstrate multiple ways of looking at "The Yellow Wallpaper" and, specifically, of reading the dominant symbol of the wallpaper and understanding the story's protagonist. The essays within this critical edition represent the breadth of theoretical perspectives that scholars have used to approach "The Yellow Wallpaper" —principally reader response, biographical, psychological (for example, Lacanian, Freudian, Adlerian), feminist, and linguistic. Although much of the criticism is feminist in its orientation, selections from the Backgrounds section convey the original response to the story as a horror tale, and several essays from the Criticism section suggest the need to extend the feminist perspective.⁴

Overlap occurs between essays, particularly those that read "The Yellow Wallpaper" through a given critical lens. However, critics often approach the story from a combination of theoretical perspectives and typically take notice of different dimensions of the story within their essays. In fact, the experience of following all the criticism of "The Yellow Wallpaper" begins to mimic that of the fictional narrator as she struggles to read the everchanging text of the wallpaper and follow it to some sort of conclusion: the story evolves before our eyes and gains new definition.

FROM THE AUTHOR

WHY I WROTE "THE YELLOW WALLPAPER"

Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.

Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and—begging my pardon—had I been there?

Now the story of the story is this:

For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia—and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush or pencil again as long as I lived." This was in 1887.

I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over.

Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again—work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite; ultimately recovering some measure of power.

Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.

The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has to my knowledge saved one woman from a similar fate—so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.

But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.

It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" (1913). In The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on "The Yellow Wallpaper," edited by Catherine Golden, pp. 52-3. New York: The Feminist Press, 1992.

Interpretations from scholars representing different disciplines and articulating distinct and, at times, dissimilar points of view have increased the recognition of Gilman and her story. The now privileged status of "The Yellow Wallpaper" conflicts with the reception it received in the 1890s as well as the conclusion Gilman realistically reached about her literary career following the publication of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and numerous poems: "All these literary efforts providing but little, it was well indeed that another avenue of work [lecturing] opened up to me at this time" (Living 65).⁵ Within this critical edition, scholars frequently make reference to the autobiographical roots of the story because of the striking parallels between the narrator's and Gilman's creative life. Revisiting the climate and situation that the author confronted in 1890 through 1892 continues to serve as a reminder of the distance the story has traveled over the past one hundred years.

To recall the apt title of one of Gilman's own poems, it took the overcoming of "An Obstacle" ⁶ for "The Yellow Wallpaper" to achieve recognition. Editors and readers were not ready to receive "The Yellow Wallpaper" when Charlotte Perkins Gilman (then Stetson)⁷ sent it to the well-established novelist, critic, and editor William Dean Howells in 1890. Gilman records in her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, that Howells had earlier initiated a correspondence; his "unforgettable letter" made her feel "like a 'real' author at last" (D. Appleton-Century, 113). In this letter dated June 9, 1890, Howells praised two of her poems, "Similar Cases" and "Women of To-day," and concluded of both: "It ["Women of To-day" ] is as good almost as the other ["Similar Cases" ], and dreadfully true" (1935; 113). Thus, it is not surprising that in an effort to publish another work that was also "dreadfully true," Gilman sent Howells, the major proponent of American realism, her consciously autobiographical "The Yellow Wallpaper." ⁸

Gilman's difficulty in getting her now acclaimed story published is not unique in literary history. But the reaction to her landmark story informs its long-lasting and virtual neglect. Howells, a former editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, recommended the story to his friend Horace Scudder, then serving as editor. Scudder's often quoted reply bears repeating:

Dear Madam,
Mr. Howells has handed me this story.
I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!
Sincerely yours,
H. E. Scudder.

Gilman concluded of her rejection: "I suppose he would have sent back one of Poe's on the same ground" (Living 64). In appraising why Scudder rejected the story, Gilman draws a salient parallel between her fiction and Edgar Allan Poe's that has illuminated the original responses to her story as a horror tale. Many have considered Gilman's tale of a woman's descent into madness a continuation of a genre made popular by Poe. Gilman's first husband, Walter Stetson, found the story more disturbing than Poe's tales of horror.⁹ As recently as 1973, horror writer H. P. Lovecraft included it as a "classic example in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room"¹⁰ in a collection titled Supernatural Horror in Literature. Nonetheless, the climate of Victorian America and its expectations for literature suggest that Scudder might well have accepted one of Poe's tales of madness yet rejected "The Yellow Wallpaper" —on different grounds. Of consequence, the story did not offer the kind of uplifting ending to which Atlantic Monthly stories typically adhered. More provocatively, the protagonist who descends into madness is a middle-class wife and mother. As Annette Kolodny has noted: "Those fond of Poe could not easily transfer their sense of mental derangement to the mind of a comfortable middle-class wife and mother; and those for whom the woman in the home was a familiar literary character were hard-pressed to comprehend so extreme an anatomy of the psychic price she paid" (154-5). No doubt Gilman's uncomfortable depiction of a familiar literary figure succumbing to madness within the sacrosanct Victorian domestic circle made Scudder "miserable." He may well have rejected the story in an attempt to protect his late nineteenth-century readers from the story's attack on the appropriate sphere for dutiful women: husband, child, and home.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" eventually found a literary residence if not a home in 1892. Gilman employed Henry Austin, a literary agent, who placed it in New England Magazine, a relatively conservative periodical offering a range of nonfiction (travel, history, and biographical spotlights), stories, and poems accompanied by photographs and black-and-white illustrations.¹¹ The story appeared with three illustrations and a decorative pictorial capital designed by Jo H. Hatfield, a staff illustrator for the magazine. Gilman never received any payment for the initial publication of the story although the editor of New England Magazine claimed that he paid Austin forty dollars for it. Nonetheless, she did receive ample compensation in reader response, which proved opinionated and mixed. One antagonistic review entitled "Perilous Stuff" (1892), appearing in the Boston Transcript, called it: "a sad story of a young wife passing the gradations from slight mental derangement to raving lunacy" (Living 64). This protester, an anonymous male physician, argued to censure the story of "deadly peril";¹² but he betrayed his own curiosity when he fearfully admitted that it held the reader "in morbid fascination to the end" (Living 64). While the story made this doctor as miserable as the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, it evoked praise from another doctor, Brummel Jones, who in 1892 sent Gilman a congratulatory letter. Jones complimented the story's authentic depiction of mental derangement and argued in a self-congratulatory tone: "From a doctor's standpoint, and I am a doctor, you have made a success. So far as I know, and I am fairly well up in literature, there has been no detailed account of incipient insanity" (Living 65).

When I read "The Yellow Wallpaper" in the original periodical, I was surprised to discover how the illustrations, along with Poe's literary influence, encouraged the original responses to the story as a horror tale of a wife and mother's mental derangement. Heretofore no critic has discussed the illustrations accompanying the story in New England Magazine. It was customary to illustrate both fiction and nonfiction pieces printed in New England Magazine, and Hatfield's pen-and-ink drawings are realistic, typical of the style of illustration the late century tended to produce.¹³ However, these illustrations, corresponding to specific lines of the story, deserve attention because they draw out, to use Brummel Jones's words, a "detailed account of incipient insanity."

Below the first illustration appears the caption "I am sitting by the Window in this Atrocious Nursery," a paraphrase of a line from the early pages of Gilman's diary-like story written from the point of view of a first-person narrative. Prominently placed as a headpiece, this illustration shows the narrator as a respectable-looking Victorian woman engaged in writing. Although the narrator writes only in secret and hides her journal when she senses John's entry, in this illustration Hatfield captures the narrator in an act that directly confronts the opinion of those who prescribe her rest cure: her physician-husband, John, who "hates to have [her] write a word" (26); S. Weir Mitchell, the foremost specialist in nervous diseases for women; and even John's sister Jennie, an "enthusiastic housekeeper" who "thinks it is the writing which made [her] sick" (30). Pen in hand and inkwell by her side, she is drawn acting deceitfully but not looking so. Seated in a decorative rocking chair by the window,¹⁴ dressed demurely, and hair swept back in a neat bun, she looks like the narrator describes John: "practical" (24). Smiling contentedly, she truly believes that "congenial work, with excitement and change, would do [her] good" (25).

The narrator's facial expression appears not contented but composed and almost rigid in the second, marginal let-in illustration whose caption reads "She didn't know I was in the Room." This illustration responds to the narrator's discussion of how Jennie (and earlier John) suspects her obsession with the paper and is puzzled by it. Less effective than the first illustration, this drawing realizes Jennie's look of alarm and confusion as well as the narrator's consciously "restrained manner" (35) as she asks Jennie to explain why she is inspecting the wallpaper. Hatfield also lightly indicates the sprouting and flamboyant curves and "sprawling outlines" (31) of the yellow wallpaper in the portion of the paper framing Jennie. No major changes occur in the narrator's dress or hairstyle although a peculiar expression clouds her too-tight composure and conveys the very beginning of her hallucinatory state—well established at this point in the story.

The final illustration, dynamically positioned as an endpiece, appears below the line it illustrates: "I had to creep over him every time."¹⁵ The dramatic shift in the portrayal of the narrator between the first two drawings and the third suggests that the narrator succumbs to full-blown madness at an alarming rate and passes through "the gradations from slight mental derangement to raving lunacy," much as the anonymous Boston reviewer describes. The illustration captures the narrator in an act very different than covert writing: creeping on the floor in front of and over John. Conveying a decrepit eeriness, her long and wild dark hair has been freed from the constraints of its late Victorian-style coiffure to accentuate her madness.¹⁶ Although there are no indications of a change in the narrator's appearance in the text (or discussion of her appearance in the text at all for that matter), Hatfield's depiction responds to the traditional conception of the long- and wild-haired madwoman in literature, Jane Eyre's Bertha Mason a prime example.

The narrator's thick and slightly frizzled mane now masks the demure details of her high-necked, long-sleeved Victorian gown. Her hair drapes down her back, in front of her shoulder, and over John, who lies prostrate underneath her in a dead faint. Alongside him lie the tattered strips of the wallpaper that the narrator has torn from the wall. John's three-quarter pose allows the reader-viewer to see the extent of his swoon, leaving his face blank, his hands limp, and his body in a fetal position. The narrator's hands, placed directly on top of John's head and back, facilitate her crawling over her husband. These graphic depictions of John in a position of extreme vulnerability as well as of the narrator in a state of total madness create a visual climax that may have encouraged the traditional response that this tale of "incipient insanity" was of "deadly peril." Totally self-absorbed in her actions, the narrator conveys disregard for and detachment from "that man" (41), who, to recall Gilman's own poem, is reduced to "An Obstacle" across her path: "And I walked directly through him / As if he wasn't there."

Anthologizing the story without the illustrations nearly thirty years later, Howells continued this line of interpretation of the story's chilling portrayal of insanity in "A Reminiscent Introduction" to his 1920 collection of The Great Modern American Stories: "It wanted at least two generations to freeze our young blood with Mrs. Perkins Gilman's story of 'The Yellow Wall Paper' " (55).¹⁷ Howells was well aware of the polemical intent permeating Gilman's fiction and her feminist principles; in fact, in the Biography and Bibliography section at the end of his collection, he emphasized the latter when he said of Gilman: "She is deeply interested in labor problems and the advance of women."¹⁸ However, Howells did not remark in his very brief introduction that "The Yellow Wallpaper" also "wanted [more than] two generations" for its feminist thrust or its polemical intent to be appreciated. Gilman emphasized the latter in her discussions of the story appearing in the Forerunner (1909-16) as well as in her autobiography.

In The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gilman records that when Howells asked her if he might include the story in his collection, she replied, "I was more than willing, but assured him that it was no more 'literature' than my other stuff, being definitely written 'with a purpose'" (65). Her purpose for writing this story has led some critics to call it a polemic against Mitchell's treatment:¹⁹ "the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways" (Living 65). In 1887 Silas Weir Mitchell treated Gilman at his Philadelphia sanitarium with his well-known rest cure of enforced passivity and confinement, a treatment which is presented by Mitchell, Gilman, and critic Ann Douglas Wood in the Backgrounds section. A leading nineteenth-century neurologist²⁰ and specialist in women's nervous disorders, Mitchell diagnosed Gilman's condition as "nervous prostration" or "neurasthenia," a breakdown of the nervous system, in her case brought on by a postpartum depression. Overwhelmed by the demands of marriage and motherhood, she willingly entered into the rest cure treatment, but Mitchell's methods and his therapeutic advice at the close of her treatment proved disastrous.

Gilman—who gave way to tremors and weeping when caring for her infant daughter—attempted to follow Mitchell's prescription: "Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time" (Living 62). She made a rag doll baby that she hung on a doorknob and began to crawl into dark corners in a state of mental despair. As Jeffrey Berman notes, "In contrast to Mitchell's dictum to return to her husband and presumably expand her family, Gilman chose the only form of pregnancy she could imagine—literary creation" (229). After nearly losing her mind by rigidly following his remaining injunction "never [to] touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live" (Living 62, Gilman, a commercial artist and writer, defied Mitchell and transformed him into a minor but memorable character in her fiction. In describing the nature of her story, Gilman records: "It is a description of a case of nervous breakdown beginning something as mine did, and treated as Dr. S. Weir Mitchell treated me with what I considered the inevitable result, progressive insanity" (Living 63) No doubt to advance her "purpose" as well as to establish medical authenticity, Gilman directly implicated Mitchell by naming the doctor in one salient reference in which the nameless narrator, undergoing a three-month rest cure for a postpartum depression, protests about her physician/husband, "John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall. But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!" (30). The narrator's "friend" serves as a shadowed reference to the author herself and further exposes the autobiographical roots of the story.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" reveals the consequences of following Mitchell's treatment and his therapeutic advice, which Gilman rigidly did for three months. The nameless narrator, like Gilman herself, initially defies the rest cure by writing, much as Hatfield's opening illustration depicts her. Once submissive, the protagonist pursues her ambition to find out the pattern of the wallpaper and to tear the wallpaper to free the woman trapped behind the pattern. She gains a forceful sense of self only as she acts out of madness. As she creeps on the floor, her actions move beyond the realm of sanity where Gilman had also found herself moving before defying her cure; in her words, "I had been as far as one could go and get back" (Living 65). Gilman managed not only to "get back" but to turn her sickness into a creative work of art that exposed Mitchell. She sent her doctor a copy of "The Yellow Wallpaper" to urge him to rethink his treatment of nervous prostration. Learning second-hand that Mitchell changed his methods upon reading her story, she proudly remarked: "If that is a fact, I have not lived in vain" (Living 65).

Gilman conceived of her work only as a story with a mission, a point that many of the critics within this book also note. Although "The Yellow Wallpaper" remains compatible with her other fiction in its attention to women's issues and women's problems, it appears distinctive from her oeuvre of fiction, which even Gilman enthusiasts consider too didactic, too ideological, and often hastily crafted. "The Yellow Wallpaper" has been singled out as the best of Gilman's creative writing. It is read today, to quote Ann Lane, as "a genuine literary piece."²¹ This representative selection from scholarship over the past two decades examines Gilman's rich and complex short story as a work of art. Critics illuminate the sociocultural, psychological, and linguistic dimensions of Gilman's literary piece as well as explore its place within the literary tradition.

The sociocultural importance of the story took nearly eight generations of readers to be appreciated; until the 1970s, as Elaine Hedges notes, "No one seems to have made the connection between insanity and the sex, or sexual role, of the victim, no one explored the story's implications of male-female relationships in the nineteenth century" (125). In her 1973 Afterword to the Feminist Press edition, Hedges reintroduced the story as "one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a nineteenth-century woman which directly confronts the sexual politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship" (124). Connecting "The Yellow Wallpaper" to Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) for its frank presentation of the submission of the middle-class wife, she links the destruction of both heroines to the climate of their times. Gail Parker initiated this sociocultural line of argument in her 1972 Introduction to The Oven Birds: American Women on Womanhood, 1820-1920. This anthology includes Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" as well as poetry and excerpts from The Home and her autobiography, alongside letters, diary excerpts, memoirs, and fiction and nonfiction writings by leading feminist thinkers, notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Addams, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Gilman's famous Beecher relatives, her great aunts Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In her historical anthology, Parker aimed to connect the history of American feminism and literary history; the inclusion of "The Yellow Wallpaper" in Parker's collection placed this work of fiction firmly within the context of the history of American feminism. Although Parker's discussion of the story is brief and largely autobiographical, she cast "The Yellow Wallpaper" in a feminist context in suggesting that it forces the reader to "recognize what happens to a woman who is denied the right to be an adult" (85). Through Parker's and Hedges's feminist readings, the story became not simply a Poe-esque horror story of mental derangement "chilling" to the blood but a fictional arena in which Gilman voiced and questioned the submissive role prescribed to women.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" does not provide an alternative, feasible female model to guide women readers of future generations as Gilman's fiction typically does. Rather, through her depiction of a rest cure, it plays out the extreme restrictions and limitations confronting women in their society in order to accentuate the fatal consequences of making a woman totally dependent on her male protectors and returning her to an infantile state. The narrator's progressive descent into madness further comments upon the doubly authoritative role of the male protagonist in this late Victorian climate: husband and doctor of "high standing" (24). In contrast, the woman trapped behind the barred pattern of the yellow wallpaper with whom the nameless narrator attempts to identify has been read not only as her literary double but as a symbol of the woman's social condition. The story touches on sensitive questions and worries that haunted Gilman and the women of her time, many of which are also raised in the selections included in the Backgrounds section by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Ann Douglas Wood, Jill Conway, and Gail Parker. The story encourages us to ponder: might a woman feel confined in the home and constricted by her male protector much as the narrator does by her paternalistic husband who, despite his well-meaning intentions, drives her into madness in administering a Mitchell-like rest cure? Might the unending demands of caring for a husband and a child she desperately loves drive a woman to a nervous breakdown, especially if she has an imaginative mind and also desires meaningful work, as the narrator does in "The Yellow Wallpaper" ? The questions Gilman's story raises about the limited sphere for women in the nineteenth century readily engage audiences today as equally as they baffled or bothered Gilman's contemporary readers who, as Kolodny argues, either lacked an awareness of the conventions of women's writing or were unprepared for the uncomfortable depiction of the middle-class housewife it revealed; the narrator's problems were presented as sociocultural rather than idiosyncratic, as was customary in the tales of Poe. More consciously autobiographical than any of her other fictional works, the story expresses Gilman's deep sadness over the lost opportunities for women not allowed to fulfill their own purpose in life.

Although Gilman's own mental illness and personal indictment of S. Weir Mitchell have often been read into "The Yellow Wallpaper," the story's psychological importance apart from Gilman's own life has not gone undetected. The yellow wallpaper lining the walls of the former nursery whose color is "hideous" and "unreliable" and whose pattern is "torturing" (34) functions as the primary symbol of the story. The wallpaper filled with "flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin" (26) soon becomes "an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions" (34). Her hallucinations evoke nightmare images revealing of the narrator's own distraught mental state. At any given moment in the story the narrator looks at the paper in disparate ways: "Looked at in one way" (31), the narrator tells us, the principle design appears as a "'debased Romanesque' with delirium tre-mens … But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase" (31). As the story unfolds, the wallpaper continues to evolve from "delirium tremens" to "wallowing seaweed" into a human form as it gains a personality, odor, and movement.

These changes have provoked a plethora of psychological readings interpreting the changes in the once abhorrent and then obsessively mesmerizing wallpaper as a psychological indicator of the narrator's mental state. Beate Schöpp-Schilling applies the psychoanalytical principles of Alfred Adler to "The Yellow Wallpaper" to appreciate the narrator's situation at the end of the story as well as Gilman's grasp of psychological processes. In her reading, the narrator's mental deterioration manifested through an excessive preoccupation with wallpaper importantly demonstrates the active characteristics of mental illness, "a perverted attempt of a human being to overcome his feelings of inferiority" (143). Jeffrey Berman interprets the changing patterns of the budding, sprouting paper as a reflection of the narrator's own fragmented state and calls it "a projection screen or Rorschach test of the narrator's growing fright" (232), particularly of her morbid fears of marriage, procreation, and motherhood.²² The dominant/muted pattern of the paper has led critics such as Judith Fetterley to read the wallpaper as a "palimpsest." The longer the narrator looks at the paper, the more definition she sees in both parts of the paper—a front pattern of bars and a muted back pattern that first looks "like" a woman (33) and then "is" a woman (34). The wallpaper becomes more than personified. As the woman behind the wallpaper becomes the narrator's sole preoccupation, she also becomes the narrator's state of mind, in Loralee MacPike's psychological interpretation. To MacPike the wallpaper, like the narrator, is "itself imprisoned in the nursery, with the humanoid heads, behind their intangible bars, denied the sexuality of bodies" (139). Not only trapped like the narrator, the wallpaper embodies contradictions and so mirrors the narrator as well as the larger social condition for women in which such contradiction remains inherent. Her identification with the formless figure, born of an hallucination, leads the narrator to free the woman and that part of herself trapped by the restrictive pattern of her own society.

Examining the psychology of the wallpaper reveals that its meaning cannot simply be fixed. Likewise, the form and language of the text lead the reader deep into the complex psyche of the narrator and invite a multiplicity of readings. The story is comprised of ten diary-like entries and written in the first person, thus giving the impression that the narrator is writing her own story in which she is also the protagonist. Critics have not typically distinguished the narrator/journalist from the protagonist who stops writing, a point of contradiction which Paula Treichler and Richard Feldstein have raised and explored. As Feldstein poses: "If the protagonist stops writing, how do we explain the completion of her journal?" (315). Answering this question invites a range of disparate interpretations and importantly maintains the multiple meanings of this richly ambiguous story that defies one reductive explanation. Has the narrator written the final entry after the fact? Has she done so consciously to prove her recovery? Both of these interpretations deny any disjunction between the narrator/narrated. But perhaps Gilman wanted to direct our attention to this very disjunction. Gilman may have called upon modernist techniques purposefully to show the narrator to be both fused with and distinct from the narrated much as she consciously shows the narrator to be separate from and joined with the woman trapped behind the wallpaper.

Particularly, the pronoun usage in the opening of the tenth entry suggests the narrator's temporary fusion of identity with the woman behind the wallpaper, which Kolodny and I note in our respective essays: "I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper" (39). Following this dramatic liberation of the woman behind the paper, the narrator emerges independent and resumes writing in the first person singular. Focusing on the narrator's linguistic struggle to defy the physician's "sentence" that condemns her to silence, Treichler argues that the narrator becomes an involved language user who authors her own sentences in a defiant, "impertinent" language. Nonetheless, the narrator who speaks defiantly remains trapped in a room, creeping.

Revising the way she reads the wallpaper, the narrator, although mad, writes in a way that no longer matches her thoughts and actions or conveys one consistent characterization of an oppressed figure who is fearful and fanciful. Interpreting the entire story as well as its main symbol of the wallpaper as a "palimpsest" allows for further examination of the linguistic features of the story. As I argue in my essay, the thoughts and actions of the narrator logically comprise its dominant text, but the writing through which the narrator expresses them (assuming the narrator/narrated is one) comprises a second, muted text informing the narrator's final characterization. Precisely at the point when she dramatically creeps on the floor, tears the wallpaper, and seemingly condemns herself to madness, the narrator increasingly uses and prominently places the nominative case pronoun in the defiant sentences she authors. Nonetheless, the forcefulness of her language, which both Treichler and I recognize, permits her only a dubious victory over patriarchal control. These discussions of the relationship between the mental and social condition of the narrator and language continue to open the multiplicity of meanings in the text and to invite further systematic examination of the style and syntax of the narrator as a language user.

Whether "The Yellow Wallpaper" should be regarded a short story or a novella also remains in dispute. While many critics consider it a short story, others call it a novella, a term that some might think increases its literary stature but that also conflicts with its brevity. Echoing the ambiguity surrounding all aspects of the text, the title shifted from being placed in quotation marks when it first appeared as a "short story" in New England Magazine in 1892 to being underlined when it was reissued as a single volume "novella" edition first in 1899 by Small, Maynard and again in 1973 by The Feminist Press. While its treatment as a single volume edition has increased attention to "The Yellow Wallpaper" asaworkoffiction in its own right, its first inclusion in Howells's anthology, The Great Modern American Stories, importantly placed Gilman's landmark story alongside the short fiction of her noted female and male American contemporaries, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Henry James. The story's inclusion in Howells's collection also paved the way for its acceptance in the contemporary American literary canon.

Conrad Shumaker discusses "The Yellow Wallpaper" in relation to central concerns of nineteenth-century American literature, particularly the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Shumaker compares Gilman's John to Hawthorne's Aylmer in "The Birthmark," and he argues that Gilman explores an issue central to American literature and culture when she reveals how the imagination becomes destroyed by a world view that leaves no room for anything that is not useful. John embodies this world view on the opening page of the story when the narrator confides: "John is practical to the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures" (24). The narrator, in contrast, has a strong imagination leading her to invent stories about things that cannot really be "felt and seen." John urges her to check this inclination by exerting self-control. John does not believe his wife is sick, treats her fancy as a "defect," and represses her imaginative nature, as Shumaker notes, "only to find he has destroyed her in the process" (246). The woman's more poetic world view presented through Gilman's narrator conflicts with the extremely "practical" approach of her sensible physician/husband John, who misreads her much as Henry James's Winterbourne crucially misreads Daisy in "Daisy Miller."

Although Shumaker finds the feminist readings of "The Yellow Wallpaper" instructive, he raises a concern that such approaches isolate "The Yellow Wallpaper" from what he considers to be the "dominant tradition" of Hawthorne, James, Twain, and Wharton, of which it is a part. But in her feminist interpretation Fetterley focuses on the theme of reading about reading, a central concern of the "classics" of American literature, and she reads "The Yellow Wallpaper" alongside Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in Rue Morgue." Building upon Kolodny's work, Jean Kennard has argued that the rise of literary conventions of women's writing not available to readers of the 1890s has allowed a feminist reading of the story to be voiced and accepted. The plethora of such feminist readings published between 1973 and 1980 has brought the story its acclaim and has led to its inclusion in the contemporary canons of both American literature and feminist literature. Collectively the work of Hedges, Kennard, Kolodny, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Fetterley helped the text to achieve a privileged status among literature by women. In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Gilbert and Gubar call "The Yellow Wallpaper" "a striking story of female confinement and escape, a paradigmatic tale which (like Jane Eyre) seems to tell the story that all literary women would tell if they could speak their 'speechless woe'" (145). Through this context, "The Yellow Wallpaper" cametobe included among those long-neglected works of nineteenth-century women writers which these authors resurrected and reinterpreted.

Along with other overlooked late nineteenth-century works of fiction such as Kate Chopin's The Awakening,"The Yellow Wallpaper" has been reprinted in numerous mainstream fiction anthologies as well as anthologies of women writers, such as the Norton Anthology of Literature By Women (1985), edited by Gilbert and Gubar. Its widespread inclusion in anthologies today demonstrates that the story has become a literary staple in courses in fiction and particularly in those with an emphasis on women's literature. The way in which the story is introduced within these anthologies has also changed. Unlike Howells, who praised the tale for its chilling qualities without reference to its feminist appeal, Gilbert and Gubar connect it to this context in their introduction: "Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) analyzed female madness in terms of women's ambivalent attitudes toward men and maternity."²³

The now frequent appearance of the story in anthologies is but one indication of its firm place in the feminist literary canon, a point that has not gone without reproach. Janice Haney-Peritz reconsiders the influential feminist criticism of the story by Hedges, Gilbert and Gubar, Kolodny, and Kennard. She raises some of the troubling implications of this criticism in which "Gilman's short story has assumed monumental proportions" (262) and "functions as a feminist monument" (262). Mary Jacobus, also reviewing the work of feminist critics Kolodny and Kennard, points out that their feminist thematic readings importantly contradict the tendency to see women as unstable or hysterical. However, she questions whether such feminist readings may prove too "rationalist" (simply positing that confinement drives the woman mad) and suggests a need to consider dimensions of the story that feminist readings had heretofore barely explored: signs pointing to an "irrationalist, Gothic" reading (the wallpaper drives the narrator mad),²⁴ the importance of the yellow color of the wallpaper (a color of sickness and decay), and the uncanny creepiness of Gilman's story. In her own essay in feminist criticism, she illuminates the uncanny and reads the disturbing color and odor of the yellow wallpaper as a symbol of the narrator's repressed sexuality, a point that Berman also makes in his more traditionally Freudian psychoanalysis, published just prior to Jacobus's.²⁵

Critics continue to debate the ambiguous and controversial ending, particularly the narrator's fate. The ending of the story defies a reductive explanation, no doubt as Gilman intended. Opinions range along a spectrum marked by extremes: liberation versus entrapment, triumph versus defeat. The pioneering studies appearing in the 1970s similarly read "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a story of a woman attempting to free herself from her restrictive, patriarchal nineteenth-century society. But these early complementary and sympathetic interpretations disagree somewhat about the degree of triumph and liberation the narrator achieves at the end of the tale. Most optimistic are the readings of Gilbert and Gubar, Kennard, and Schöpp-Shilling. Gilbert and Gubar argue that the narrator, "a supposedly 'mad' woman has been sentenced to imprisonment in the 'infected' house of her own body" (148); however, through identification with the double trapped on the other side of the wallpaper, the woman—whom society perceives as mad—escapes from her textual and architectural confinement into "the open space of [her] own authority" (147). Through Kennard's eyes, the narrator's madness can be seen even more optimistically as "a form of higher sanity, as an indication of a capacity to see truths other than those available to the logical mind" (180). Furthermore, to Kennard the narrator's discomfort in ancestral halls becomes a healthy expression of a desire for freedom and space, and her descent into madness a spiritual quest "if we agree to read madness as sanity" (182). In Schöpp-Schilling's positive reading, the narrator defies her husband, who forbids her to write, by turning to another form of paper—the wallpaper. The heroine's final descent into madness becomes a supreme defiance, "which ultimately enables her to creep triumphantly over her husband" (143). Of these early readings, Hedges and Kolodny, in contrast, emphasize the limitations of the narrator's situation at the end of the story. Through Hedges's lens, the narrator achieves temporary insight but "is destroyed" (132), completely mad. Kolodny similarly interprets the narrator's situation as a liberation into madness only "for in decoding her own projections onto the paper, the protagonist has managed to reencode them once more, and now more firmly than ever, within" (158).

Swinging across this spectrum, the narrator is allowed a partial victory by some critics of the mid-1980s, who place her between the extremes of finding meaning or self-definition in her state of madness to retreating into an inhuman or inanimate state. To Fetterley, the narrator achieves a "temporary sanity"; although this state enables her to express feelings that John represses, these emotions inevitably energize her to act out her madness rather than merely imagine it. Although Fetterley argues that the narrator does not escape the patriarchal text when she "got out at last" (41), she allows that the narrator's choice of literal madness may be preferable to John's confining prescription for sanity. Placing the narrator midway along the spectrum of entrapment versus liberation, Treichler concludes that "the story only hints at possibilities for change. Woman is both passive and active, subject and object, sane and mad" (207). She argues that the social conditions must change before the narrator and other women can truly be free. Writing in the late 1980s, I similarly permit the narrator a "dubious victory" because "Only at the point at which she acts out of madness does she find a place within the patriarchal language she uses, although not yet within her larger social reality" (304).

Not all critics perceive the narrator in limbo between madness and sanity or on the road to victory as some of the pioneering studies do. Marking a turning point in the literary criticism of "The Yellow Wallpaper," the mid-1980s favored a darker reading of the story and a more pessimistic view of the narrator's fate. In opposition to Gilbert and Gubar, Haney-Peritz asserts that "the narrator does not move out into open country; instead, she turns an ancestral hall into a haunted house and then encrypts herself therein as a fantasy figure" (271). Considering the story a "memento mori that signifies the death of (a) woman rather than as a memorial that encloses the body essential to a viable feminist criticism" (271), she suggests that a "memento mori" invokes sympathy for what may happen when a repressed woman can express herself only by encasing herself within an imaginary realm.

Emphasizing the narrator's animalness rather than her inanimateness, Jacobus describes how "The narrator of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' enacts her abject state first by timorousness and stealth (her acquiescence in her own 'treatment,' and her secret writing), then by creeping, and finally by going on all fours over the supine body of her husband" (286). She expands upon the animal-hood of the hysterical narrator by likening her to Brontë's madwoman in the attic of Thornfield Hall, an association with Jane Eyre far different than Gilbert and Gubar's. To Jacobus, "The woman on all fours is like Bertha Mason, an embodiment of the animality of woman unre-deemed by (masculine) reason" (287-8). Whereas the act of crawling becomes a condition of animalhood through Jacobus's 1986 reading, the same act serves as the triumphant overcoming of John (the narrator creeps over him) in Kennard's 1981 essay, or as a purposeful exertion of self-control—a means to shock John into a faint—in Feldstein's more recent 1989 reading. John's fainting has become a subject for discussion, some critics pointing to it as a sign that the narrator has outwitted John and others arguing that he will recover and commit his wife in the end. Feldstein also proposes that the narrator's action of crawling be seen as a form of self-expression: "Prohibited from writing in her journal, the narrator embodies herself as a stylus writing the line, her body being written in the process" (313) or, one might argue, giving birth to itself. The evolution in the way the narrator and the story itself have been read continues to defy a reductive pattern as does the story itself. Moving from the pioneering studies that appeared in the 1970s to the new historicist and cultural studies readings of the late 1980s, Hedges, in her concluding essay, explores the ways critics within and beyond this collection have looked at the story over the last two decades. Returning to examine the criticism following her Afterword accompanying the story's 1973 republication, she provocatively notes what aspects of "The Yellow Wallpaper" subsequent readings have highlighted or shadowed and points out the implications of some of the most recent criticism.

The gathering of many of these essays into a single book foregrounds the discussion among critics who have read "The Yellow Wallpaper" over the past two decades, a conversation that becomes increasingly more complex as critics openly debate central aspects of the story with each other. This aspect of literary criticism is not exclusive to "The Yellow Wallpaper." However, the increasingly dialogic quality of the literary criticism about Gilman's story, however, reveals that scholars are as actively engaged in reading and responding to each other's interpretations of "The Yellow Wallpaper" as they are in reading the story itself. For example, Schöpp-Schilling begins her psychological approach to the story by criticizing the work of feminist scholars Wood, Parker, and Hedges who, in her opinion, read Gilman's biography and personal motivations into the story and so fall prey to the biographical fallacy. In presenting her own feminist interpretation of the story as a woman's quest for identity within an oppressive patriarchy, Kennard draws upon three previously published feminist readings by Hedges, Kolodny, and Gilbert and Gubar. In an explanatory note, Fetterley acknowledges the influence of Kolodny's and Kennard's interpretations on her own feminist reading of the gender dynamics of the story. Although Shumaker finds the feminist approaches of Kolodny and Kennard persuasive, he attempts to broaden discussion of the story by reading it in relation to central concerns of American literature. The critical exchange becomes most striking in the debate occurring among three feminist critics that appeared in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature in 1984 and 1985. Carol Neely and Karen Ford responded to Treichler's essay "Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in 'The Yellow Wallpaper' " (included in this book), and Treichler, in turn, wrote a rejoinder to both critics printed alongside their pieces.²⁶

As the essays in this book show, "The Yellow Wallpaper" continues to prompt an interactive and productive exchange of opinion because it seems to raise more questions than it answers. The nature of the story, the meaning of the wallpaper, the narrator's fate, her act of crawling, and whether or not the narrator has outwitted John and "got out at last" (41) emerge as some of the salient issues critics debate, often in conversation with each other. This critical edition serves as a reminder of the ways Gilman's story has been read but also as an invitation for new readings of it. The essays that follow also encourage teachers, students, and Gilman specialists to respond actively to the work of critics who read "The Yellow Wallpaper" and to entertain the questions that this complex and richly ambiguous story poses.

Notes

Although the story first appeared in volume 5, no. 5 (January 1892) of New England Magazine (New Series) under the name of Charlotte Perkins Stetson, critics have variously noted the story's original date of publication as May 1891, January 1892, and May 1892. Critics within this collection list the date of the story's first publication most often as May 1892. The confusion surrounding the date no doubt stems from the way in which journals were bound at that time. While today we bind volumes by year, New England Magazine at the turn of the century did not. Volume 5 contains six volumes, beginning with September 1891 through February 1892. Had the magazine bound issues by year of publication, volume 5, no. 5 would have been May 1892. Compounding this confusion, Gilman in her autobiography reprints a letter written to New England Magazine that suggests that the publication date was May 1891 (The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman [New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1935], p. 119). (All further references will be taken from the reprint here, unless otherwise indicated, and cited in the text.) Gilman does have other inaccuracies in her autobiography. For example, she lists the year she founded a gymnasium for women as 1891 instead of 1881 (D. Appleton-Century, p. 66) and notes that the title of Howells's anthology that reprinted her story was Masterpieces in American Fiction instead of Great Modern American Stories (p. 65).
Small, Maynard reprinted the story as a single-volume edition in 1899. The following anthologies published between 1892 and 1972 reprint the story: William Dean Howells, ed. The Great Modern American Stories (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920); Leslie Y. Rabkin, ed. Psychopathology and Literature (San Francisco: Chandler Publications, 1966); Elaine Gottlieb Hemley and Jack Mathews, eds. The Writer's Signature: Idea in Story and Essay (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman & Co., 1972); Seon Manley and Gogo Lewis, eds. Ladies of Horror: Two Centuries of Supernatural Stories by the Gentle Sex (New York: Lothrop, Lee, & Shepard, 1971); Gail Parker, ed., The Oven Birds: American Women on Womanhood, 1820-1920 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972).
In her essay "'Out at Last'? 'The Yellow Wallpaper' after Two Decades of Feminist Criticism" (in this volume), Elaine Hedges provides useful statistics on the story's widespread republication and recognition. She notes that nearly two decades since its 1973 reissue, "The Yellow Wallpaper" has been reprinted in England, Iceland, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Germany. Gilman's landmark story has also inspired several film versions, plays, an opera, and a "Masterpiece Theatre" adaptation, resulting in wider public recognition of Gilman and this important work.
The texts of essays included in this volume are reprinted as they appeared originally. Thus, references to editions of "The Yellow Wallpaper" vary as does spelling of the title. For discussion of these and other variations within criticism of the story, see "Reader, Text, and Ambiguous Referentiality in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" by Richard Feldstein in this volume.
For further discussion of Gilman's literary frustrations see the autobiography.
This poem is reprinted as an epigram to the critical edition. It also appears in Zona Gale's Foreword to Living, pp. xxxiii-xxxiv.
Gilman was then Charlotte Perkins Stetson. She also published "The Yellow Wallpaper" under that name. For consistency, I refer to her as Gilman throughout the Introduction.
Thus, many critics argue that to read "The Yellow Wallpaper" requires biographical background. Within this book, see, for example, essays by Hedges (her Afterword) and Berman.
See Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist 1860-1896 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 186 for Gilman's account of Stetson's reaction to "The Yellow Wallpaper."
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Weird Tradition in America," Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York: Dover Books, 1973), p. 72. Lovecraft goes on to assert that the room confined a former madwoman. Jacobus also raises this idea in her essay in this volume. In the text, Gilman reveals that the room, rather, was a former nursery, then a playroom and gymnasium.
The other selections in the January 1892 issue are, in order: "Phillips Brooks," by Julius H. Ward; "The Master of Raven's Woe," a poem by Arthur L. Salmon; "Mice at Eavesdropping," by A. Rodent; "Purification," a poem by George Edgar Montgomery; "The City of St. Louis," by Prof. C. M. Woodward; "Deposed," a poem by Florence E. Pratt; "George William Curtis," a poem by John W. Chadwick; "Salem Witch," a story by Edith Mary Norris; "Author of Old Oaken Bucket," by George M. Young; "Christmas Eve," a poem by Agnes Maule Machar; "Stories of Salem Witchcraft," by Winfield S. Nevins; "Abraham Lincoln," by Phillips Brooks; "'Tis Better To Have Loved And Lost," a poem by Philip Bourke Marston. The periodical concluded with two regular features: "Omnibus," including short one or two stanza poems by a number of male and female authors; "Editor's Table." Of the stories included in the six issues of volume 5, "Dr. Cabot's Two Brains," by Jeanette B. Perry, also illustrated by Jo H. Hatfield (pp. 344-54), comes the closest to Gilman's in its portrayal of a patronizing male physician who has "a very poor opinion of the mental ability of women" (p. 347).
The anonymous male physician writes: "To others, whose lives have become a struggle against an heredity of mental derangement, such literature contains deadly peril. Should such stories be allowed to pass without severest censure?" The latter is reprinted on p. 64.
A black-and-white decorative square motif surrounds the letter "I." Although it appears that this motif was commonly used in pictorial capital designs for New England Magazine, the pictorial capital introducing "The Yellow Wallpaper" proves interesting in relation to the story. The top triangle is of a dark pattern, reminiscent of the designs of the yellow wallpaper, while the bottom triangle remains white. This part of the design appears almost as a Yin-Yang symbol suggesting other dichotomies in the story and its writing. For other examples of Hatfield's capitals, see, for instance, two stories illustrated by Hatfield: "Dr. Cabot's Two Brains," by Jeanette B. Perry, New England Magazine 5:344-54; "The Squire's Niece Maria," by Mary F. Haynes, New England Magazine 6:461-71.
On close examination of the illustration, the lines on the windows look like bars.
The caption does not appear in the actual story, but it is listed in the Table of Contents.
In the 1989 "Masterpiece Theatre" PBS presentation of "The Yellow Wallpaper," introduced by Alistair Cooke, the narrator in the final scene is similarly shown to be a madwoman with long and mangy hair as she creeps on the floor and crawls over her husband.
For further discussion of Howells's brief but informative response to the story, see the Header in the Backgrounds section.
William Dean Howells, Great Modern American Stories (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920), p. 427. In these brief biographical entries, Howells also notes Gilman's family background, specifically that she descended from Lyman Beecher and twice married. At the end of the entry he offers a list of Gilman's fiction and nonfiction.
In The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), Elaine Showalter writes, "Her story is a powerful polemic against Mitchell's methods" (p. 141).
Mitchell was trained as a neurologist, as was Sigmund Freud. Medical practice of his time considered nerves to be the link between body and mind. Mitchell explored the relationship between psychology and physiology and believed that by healing the body he was also healing the mind. For more thorough discussion, see the Headnote to the selections from Mitchell's Fat and Blood: And How to Make Them in the Backgrounds section.
Ann J. Lane, ed., "The Fictional World of Charlotte Perkins Gilman." Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. xviii. Lane discusses the limitations of Gilman's writing style in her introduction.
For a similar interpretation, see Julian Evans Fleenor, "The Gothic Prism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Gothic Stories and Her Autobiography," The Female Gothic, ed. Julian Evans Fleenor (Montreal: Eden, 1983).
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds., Norton Anthology of Literature By Women: The Tradition in English (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985), p. 966.
For a feminist Gothic reading of "The Yellow Wallpaper," see a 1990 article by Michelle A. Masse appearing in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 4: 679-709, entitled "Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors, and Things That Bump in the Night."
In a recent essay appearing in Feminist Studies, Susan Lanser discusses the relationship between the color of the wallpaper and racism in turn-of-the-century America and also makes an original case regarding the reproduction and repression of racism in "The Yellow Wallpaper." See, "Feminist Criticism, 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' and the Politics of Color in America," Feminist Studies 15, no. 3 (1989): 415-41.
Whereas Treichler sets her initial discussion of "women's discourse" in the context of medical diagnosis, Neely situates hers in the discourse of midwifery and childbirth, and Ford places hers in the context of female literary narratives. Neely begins her response, entitled "Alternative Women's Discourse," by openly disagreeing with Treichler's argument that the narrator escapes the patriarchal sentence to become an involved language user who authors her own sentences; however, she concludes that "'women's discourse' proves difficult to define because it remains so intertwined with the patriarchal discourse it tries to displace that it is difficult to be sure such a female discourse is really there. Hence Paula Treichler's interpretation of the yellow wallpaper and mine are not, perhaps, as antithetical as they might first appear to be" (Tulsa Studies 4, no. 2 [1985]: 321). In "'The Yellow Wallpaper' and Women's Discourse," Ford pursues the apparent difficulties which Treichler's analysis raises. For example, she argues that the narrator does not escape male diagnosis as Treichler suggests but becomes more of a victim of it as she involves herself more actively in the wallpaper and begins "creeping on all fours like the child John has accused her of being" (Tulsa Studies 4, no. 2 [1985]: 310). Tearing down the wallpaper signals a retreat from discourse and a recognition that discourse is controlled by patriarchy. Treichler concedes to the logic and persuasiveness of both interpretations in her 1985 rejoinder, entitled "The Wall Behind the Yellow Wallpaper: Response to Carol Neely and Karen Ford," (Tulsa Studies 4, no. 2 [1985]: 323-30). Like Neely, she does not find their views incompatible with her own and builds from their dialogue on women's discourse. Specifically, Treichler uses their comments to clarify further her thinking about language and feminist literary analysis, the problems inherent in the terms "women's discourse" and "alternative discourse," and the difficulty of defining the metaphor of the yellow wallpaper. In summarizing this entire debate between Treichler, Neely, and Ford in the introduction to his own 1989 essay, Feldstein foregrounds this earlier dialogue and keeps it ongoing.